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The Best Games of 2008
As the year comes to an end, most game sites are putting up lists highlighting their favorite games of 2008. Gamasutra is no exception, but they've nicely consolidated a variety of lists, and included some of their reasons and commentary to go with them. The topics range from the best overlooked games (Soul Bubbles and Pure) to the best new gameplay mechanics (first-person parkour in Mirror's Edge and Spore's procedural content generation) to the best overall games of the year (Fallout 3, World of Goo, and LittleBigPlanet). What were your top games of 2008?
Well, it's been an interesting year - quite a few very good titles (with a particularly large cluster of these released in the September - November range) and also a few which turned out to be fairly huge disappointments.
Anyway, my own top 10:
10) Super Smash Bros Brawl (Wii) - a rare example of a first party Nintendo game which has decent production values and doesn't suffer from a severe lack of content. The single-player campaign is slightly let down by a few over-long platforming sections, but the brawling components are more than fun enough make up for it.
9) Siren: Blood Curse (PS3) - the only game I've seen to date to really pull off the whole "episodic gaming" thing. Blood Curse is the best entry to date in what has always been a very solid survival horror series. It's an excellent refuge for those who have been put off by the action-oriented direction that the Resident Evil franchise has taken and the continued flogging of the dead horse that the once-epic Silent Hill franchise has become ever since its 4th installment.
8) The World Ends With You (Nintendo DS) - quirky and original take on the Japanese RPG formula. The distinctive style isn't to everybody's taste (or even particularly to mine), but it did produce one of the most unique titles of the last 12 months. A huge range of customisation options (including heavily tweakable difficulty settings) further boost its appeal.
7) Lost Odyssey (Xbox 360) - hugely traditional take on the Japanese RPG formula. Superb production values and a well thought out narrative pull it above the average. A big improvement on 2007's Blue Dragon and a real sign that Square-Enix should be taking the competition from Mistwalker very, very seriously. The game's also notable for its extensive use of narrative text storytelling to flesh out the back-story.
6) Resistance 2 (PS3) - A few dubious design decisions mean that this isn't quite as good as its predecessor (the limitation on the number of weapons you can carry feels particularly restrictive in a game that's so heavily based around trying out funky weapons). However, it's still a slick and fun game, whose controls feel far more robust than those of pretty much any other console fps.
5) Far Cry 2 (PC - also Xbox 360 and PS3) - Despite a "ripped from the headlines" story that really is the ultimate in bad taste, this is a deeply impressive shooter. It takes some of the good ideas we saw in last year's STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl and marries them with the execution needed to really pull them off.
4) Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3) - Yeah, this is the controversial one. With the cutscenes being, at a rough estimate, roughly twice the length of the playable sections of the game, this was never going to be everybody's cup of tea. However, a complete overhaul of the combat system took the series from being one where combat was, as Penny Arcade put it, a punishment inflicted on the player for getting the stealth sections wrong to a being one of the most fun games to play as a shooter of the entire year. The fact that you can play it as a stealth-em-up just adds icing to the cake. The game's graphics and production values blow away anything else released during this year.
3) Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) - It doesn't do anything particularly original, but it improves on the original game in almost every respect. It presents a longer campaign with better balance than the original, more varied environments and some excellent tweaks to the weapons lineup. It also features some of the most fun multiplayer modes of any game I've seen this year, with a heavy emphasis on co-op and team-based gameplay.
2) Dead Space (Xbox 360, also PC and PS3) - Half way between Gears of War and a traditional survival-horror game, this was very close to being my favorite title of the entire year. As others have noted, it's anything but original, drawing heavy inspiration from three movies in particular: Aliens, Event Horizon and the Thing. However, it still establishes its own distinctive identity and mana
I'm probably being overly fixated on one of the many games featured on the list, but I must be one of the only people out there who thinks Fallout 3 was one of the most overrated games of the year, perhaps third only to GTA5 and Spore.
When I first played the game I regretted my purchase and lamented the fact that I couldn't return the game, having gotten the PC version. But I decided to spend more time with the game and found that my impression hadn't changed.
Getting past the excessively monotone color scheme, I will admit the game looks impressive. But otherwise I found it to be extremely tedious and the story a bit contrived. The characters followed the same uninspired templates I find in bad Sci-Fi channel movies.
While I can accept the gritty theme of the game, I dislike overly realistic characters that end up looking ugly and more like actors than actual inhabitants of the world being depicted. Always lame is when children look like miniature adults, mainly because of overly mottled facial textures. Encountering old people in the game made me laugh a few times because of how insanely wrinkled they were, like they were made of cracked leather or clay.
I don't care for having to repair my equipment, are constantly being encumbered by random crap I find, having to sit there and sort through inventory trying to determine what I need and don't need. The side quests are so disruptive to flow and feel so disconnected that I eventually lost track and forgot what the main quest was all about. Basically, it's reminiscent of Bethesda's other RPGs, Morrowind included. Although I think that, in terms of gameplay, was the superior game.
One high point was combat which was somewhat entertaining. The targetting feature, while helpful, I found disruptive and felt like little more than an excuse to showcase the violence.
Maybe the game gets better, but I don't have the patience to find out.
Interestingly enough, I played Knights of the Old Republic 2 for the first time less than a week after abandoning Fallout 3 and found that to be, far and a way, a much better game. It wasn't perfect and I'm not normally one for Star Wars games but it was very engaging the whole way through and a lot of fun to play. The customization was satisfying without being tedious. About the only thing that crossed my mind a few times was what KOTOR2 would look like with current generation graphics on the level of Fallout 3 but with more style.
Nonsense story, terrible and surprisingly limited ending, very few side-quest arcs (and even fewer that had a satisfying payoff), and only 3 cities, only one of those had anywhere near as much depth as even Klamath did in F2.
- Nonsense story, completely true, you are thrust into a world where you can live a life of any range of karma (angel, good, neutral, bad, evil) but no matter how to choose to live your life the main story is always the same. The Water of Life. Not open ended and extremely boring. Forcing the player into a boring and linear story ruins almost the entire single-player experience once you get to the worst and most disappointing ending I've ever experience. Remember, Bethesda specifically promised over 200 unique endings, saying that the character could end the game in almost 200 different ways. Later on their own forums for Fallout 3 they admitted it was an error and that there are only four endings, not 200, quite a large discrepancy between 200 endings and four.
Bethesda needs to spend more money on writers and less on their managers that keep shipping obviously-unfinished games out the door.
Rumor has it that Bethesda spent significant amounts of budget on hiring the voice actors for the game, specifically two or three more famous ones, and that it broke the bank on the project. They invested so much money into voice acting that other aspects of the game had no extra budget.
Now see I hated VATS. I thought it was a horrible system which took the worst parts from both real time FPS combat and turn based combat. On one hand you have a finite amount of action points which have to be recharged over time, on the other the enemy doesn't have AP, it just attacks until one of you dies. A lot of the time I would just end up running up to the guy point blank, going into VATS, use all of my AP on his head (which had a 90% probability of hitting) and then watch the slow motion carnage. After it was over I'd run the hell away and let my AP recharge. I know other people didn't mind VATS, but for me it was rather annoying.
Beyond that I thought Fallout 3 was an okay game. It definitely had the atmosphere of the previous two Fallout games, and I loved the graphics. I didn't even care that it was in the first person perspective. They even had some of the same kind of humor that the originals had. There were plenty of little gripes though, for instance the pipboy interface was clearly designed with consoles in mind. It had nested menus within nested menus. Granted the original Fallouts didn't have amazing interfaces, but I was expecting an improvement, not an interface designed solely with the console in mind (I bought the PC version). I also agree that the story was a bit shallow.
As for other games this year, here's what I think:
FarCry 2: It had nothing to do with the original, kind of like C&C:Generals. It was basically GTA in Africa. I thought the graphics were superb, blowing things up and lighting vast fields aflame were fun, but it got kind of tedious. All you do is go to X to kill Y for Z diamons. I haven't completed it yet, I'm about 3/4 done, but so far the story is horrible. I don't even know why they bothered.
Another gripe I had with FarCry 2 was the fact that they went for realism in some areas, but not others. You didn't have a reticule, you had to use iron sights. Vehicles broke down, weapons jammed (even bolt action rifles), etc... At the same time the vehicles are made from paper mache, guard posts would mysteriously resupply with troops when you get a hundred yards away (and not question the dead bodies apparently), and your character can get turned into swiss cheese by a volley of bullets and a syringe full of Cureital fixes everything.
I also had a problem with locating enemies sometimes. They'd always know where I was if I walked within a kilometer of them, but sometimes it took me several minutes just to locate them. Overall I thought the game was pretty and kind of fun, but I was hoping for more.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Yes, I actually bought this game. Or rather, I bought a license which allows me to install it on 5 different computers and that's it. Before we get started let me say I loved the new naval warfare. I honestly thought that was a good addition. I also enjoyed how units had two different "attacks". The music was also quite good. Beyond those few things, there wasn't anything else I liked about the game. A lot of the story was rehashed from the first two, the Empire of the Rising sun felt very awkward, a lot of the graphics were sort of cartoony (yet the water wasn't at all), and EA hired more breasts than writers*.
One thing that really annoyed me was the forced co-op single player. When started to play the first mission it gave me a choice between solo and co-op. I thought at the time that co-op is a great idea and would be fun, but I didn't have anyone to play with at the time, so I went for solo. To my surprise I was forced to play the map with a computer ally (with campy dialogue). Now with C&C games I love capturing enemy bases to win, call it a quirk, but I always found that more satisfying than rolling them with a million units. However, now that I was forced to play with a computer ally with very limited control** either the computer would destroy the base before I could capture it, or the computer would be wiped out and I'd have to guard that flank. Overall I think the C&C franchise
Sim Cardboard City.
Jobsearch II.
Hunt the CFO.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yeah, I went into fallout 3 full of hopes and expectations, I found oblivion with guns. I've tried my best, I really have, but I really can't get into it much.
Ezekiel 23:20